What score should you aim for? Benchmarks for all 24 games

Where these tiers come from

The thresholds listed in this guide are not estimates: they are the values that actually fire the trophies. Every game carries a series of progression trophies, and each one unlocks at a precise number. Those numbers were tuned game by game from real runs, which makes them the most reliable scale to place yourself on: if you take the middle trophy of a series, you already play better than the average visitor.

Three markers come back from one game to the next:

• Beginner: the first real threshold past the discovery run. It almost always drops within your first few sessions.
• Skilled: you have the mechanic down and you no longer lose by accident. This is the tier that asks you to understand the game, not just to replay it.
• Expert: the top of the pile. It assumes a good run from start to finish, no crude mistakes, and often a little luck.

Every game also has a plausibility ceiling checked on the server. It is not a target — it sits deliberately far above anything a human reaches — but it gives you the scale of the playing field, and any score above it is turned away from the leaderboard. Think of it as the edge of the map rather than as a goal.

Careful: on six games, the smallest score wins

This is what throws most players off in front of a leaderboard. On the vast majority of games the score is a point counter: the bigger the better, and the table runs from highest to lowest. But six games in the catalogue are not ranked on points at all: they are ranked on the TIME it took you to finish, or on the NUMBER OF MOVES you used. There, everything flips — the best player is the one showing the smallest number, and the table is sorted the other way round.

The six games where smaller means better:

• Minesweeper Néon — the score is the time it took you to clear the grid.
• Slide Puzzle Néon — the time it took to put the tiles back in order.
• Sudoku Néon — the time, plus a penalty for every mistake.
• Néon Nonogram — the time it took to solve the grid.
• Néon Word Search — the time it took to find every word.
• Néon Lights — the only one that counts moves rather than time: the fewer presses, the higher you rank.

On those six games the leaderboard columns show a time, not a score. The practical consequence: do not try to make the run last in order to inflate a number — you want exactly the opposite. And on the other eighteen games the reverse holds: lasting longer is scoring more.

The arcade family: survive as long as you can

Six games make up this family. The principle is always the same: difficulty climbs, you score for as long as you survive, and the run stops when you go down. Points are counted in thousands here and the gaps between players are enormous — this is the family where improving changes the number on screen the most.

The tiers, from the most reachable to the most demanding:

• Néon Brick-Breaker — skilled 25,000, expert 100,000. This game only has two numbered tiers: below 25,000 there is no intermediate threshold, the first trophy simply rewards your first ranked run.
• Néon Assault — beginner 500, skilled 5,000, expert 20,000.
• Néon Bubble — beginner 1,000, skilled 5,000, expert 20,000.
• Néon Front — beginner 500, skilled 5,000, expert 20,000.
• Néon Starship — beginner 2,000, skilled 10,000, expert 50,000. The score ramps up hard late in a run: every boss you bring down is worth more than the last, so the final cycles weigh far heavier than the opening ones.
• Néon Tower Defense — the score is not in points but in WAVES survived: beginner 5, skilled 15, expert 30. Getting past 30 waves is a very long run.

Clear the expert tiers of this family and you are among the best. For scale, the server-checked ceilings sit far above: 400,000 points for Néon Starship, 100,000 for Néon Front, 75,000 for Néon Assault, 50,000 for Néon Bubble, and 200 waves for Néon Tower Defense. Nobody is meant to touch them; they exist to block impossible scores.

The retro family: classics on wildly different scales

Three games here, and this is the family where the number on screen is the most misleading. A score of 30 can be excellent on one and laughable on another: it all depends on what the game counts. Always compare your score to that game’s tier, never to the score you posted somewhere else.

• Snake Néon — beginner 200, skilled 1,000, expert 3,000. The server ceiling sits at 100,000, but 3,000 already means a very long snake on a badly crowded grid.
• Néon Stack — beginner 1,000, skilled 5,000, expert 15,000, plus a final tier at 30,000 for the stubborn. The very first trophy already asks for 100 points.
• Néon Paddles — beginner 10, skilled 30, expert 60. Every point here takes a full rally, so scores stay deliberately small: 60 points is a very long match, and the game’s ceiling is 100.

The reflex family: short runs, tight tiers

Four games, one shared promise: a run lasts a handful of seconds or minutes and you restart straight away. The tiers sit close together, which makes progress very legible — you can watch your level climb from one session to the next.

• Néon Flap — beginner 10 gates, skilled 50, expert 100, with a summit at 150. The server ceiling is 1,000 gates.
• Néon Hop — beginner 25 rows, skilled 100, expert 200, with a final tier at 350.
• Memory Néon — the score is the number of sequences you reproduce: beginner 5, skilled 15, expert 20, and a remarkable-memory tier at 30. The game’s ceiling is 50, so passing 20 already puts you very high.
• Néon Runner — the score is the distance covered: beginner 500, skilled 2,500, expert 10,000.

Puzzles played for points

The puzzle family is the largest in the catalogue, and it splits into two halves that do not follow the same logic. Here is the half played for points, where the biggest number wins just like in the arcade.

• 2048 Néon — the tiers follow the tiles you reach: 1,792 points correspond to the 256 tile, 9,216 to the 1024 tile, 20,480 to the fabled 2048 tile, and 45,056 to the 4096 tile for specialists. A score of 20,000 is therefore the real symbolic milestone of the game.
• Néon Match — beginner 500, skilled 3,000, expert 12,000. A run lasts a fixed number of swaps, so everything rides on the quality of your chains, not on endurance.
• Néon Blocks — beginner 500, skilled 2,500, expert 10,000.
• Words Néon — the benchmark depends on the mode, since the starting scale changes: 6,000 on easy, 9,000 on medium, 12,000 on hard. On easy, 3,100 marks a win in three guesses and 5,100 a win on the first guess; on hard, those same markers rise to 9,100 and 11,100. Since time never costs you more than 900 points, finding the word on the first guess puts you above the upper marker of your mode even if you take all the time in the world.
• Néon Flow — the score is the number of levels solved before the clock runs out: beginner 5, skilled 10, expert 25. The tiers at 50 and 100 exist but belong to the realm of feats, because the clock drains on the big grids.

Puzzles played against the clock (or on moves)

Here is the other half: finishing is enough to make the run count, and it is SPEED that ranks you. The tiers therefore read backwards — you have to come in under the time shown.

• Minesweeper Néon — two tiers only: under 2 minutes, then under 30 seconds for the fast. There is no third numbered level on this game.
• Slide Puzzle Néon — under 1 minute, then under 30 seconds. Two tiers here too, not three.
• Sudoku Néon — only one time threshold exists today: solving the grid in 5 minutes or less. The game’s other trophies reward regularity (a first grid, then five solved grids), not speed.
• Néon Nonogram — one minute or less, then 30 seconds or less. Two extra tiers reward the bigger grids: the medium grid wrapped up in 2 minutes or less, the expert grid in 4 minutes or less.
• Néon Word Search — the finest scale in the catalogue: 5 minutes, 3 minutes, 2 minutes, 90 seconds, then 1 minute or less for the summit. On the big grids the markers shift: 4 minutes on medium, 6 minutes on hard.
• Néon Lights — the only one ranked on MOVES: 25 moves or fewer to get started, 18 to confirm, 12 for good play, 8 for the near-perfect solution. Eight moves is reachable, but it leaves no room for guesswork.

Putting these benchmarks to use

The most effective way to use this page is to pick a single game and aim for the tier just above your current record. The tiers were spaced so that each one asks for real progress without ever looking out of reach: going from beginner to skilled usually takes a few sessions, not a few months.

Finally, keep in mind that these tiers hold for everyone, signed in or not: they describe a level of play, not your status. Only the scores of signed-in players, however, enter the leaderboards and fire the trophies. If you play anonymously, your record stays in your browser — the tiers above still tell you where you stand.